[177] Plato, Leges, ix. 879. Cf. Idem, Respublica, v. 465.
[178] Maine, Early Law and Custom, p. 243.
In Europe the paternal authority of the archaic type which we have just considered has gradually yielded to a system under which the father has been divested of the most essential rights he formerly possessed over his children—a system the inmost drift of which is expressed in the words of the French Encyclopedist, “Le pouvoir paternel est plutôt un devoir qu’un pouvoir.”[179] Already in pagan times the Roman patria potestas became a shadow of what it had been. Under the Republic the abuses of paternal authority were checked by the censors, and in later times the Emperors reduced the father’s power within comparatively narrow limits. Not only was the life of the child practically as sacred as that of the parent long before Christianity became the religion of Rome,[180] but Alexander Severus ordained that heavy punishments should be inflicted on members of a family by the magistrate only. Diocletian and Maximilian took away the power of selling freeborn children as slaves. The father’s privilege of dictating marriage for his sons declined into a conditional veto; and it seems that the daughters also, at length, gained a certain amount of freedom in the choice of a husband.[181]
[179] Encyclopédie méthodique, Jurisprudence, vii. 77, art. Puissance paternelle.
[180] Supra, [p. 393 sq.]
[181] Westermarck, op. cit. p. 236.
The new religion was anything but unfavourable to this process of emancipation. The ethical precept of filial piety was changed by Christ. His church was a militant church. He had come not to send peace but a sword, “to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother.”[182] Being chiefly addressed to the young, the new teaching naturally caused much disorder in families. Fathers disinherited their converted sons,[183] and children thought that they owed no duty to their parents where such a duty was opposed to the interests of their souls. According to Gregory the Great, we ought to ignore our parents, hating them and flying from them when they are an obstacle to us in the way of the Lord;[184] and this became the accepted theory of the Church.[185] Nay, it was not only in similar cases of conflict that Christianity exercised a weakening influence on family ties which had previously been regarded with religious veneration. In all circumstances the relationship between child and parent was put in the shade by the relationship between man and God. “Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in Heaven.”[186] “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”[187] At the same time the fifth commandment, though modified by considerations which would never have occurred to the mind of an orthodox Jew, was left formally intact. Obedience to parents was, in fact, repeatedly enjoined by St. Paul as a Christian duty.[188] It was regarded as a prerequisite for the veneration of God. “If we do not honour and reverence our parents, whom we ought to love next to God, and whom we have almost continually before our eyes, how can we honour or reverence God, the supreme and best of parents, whom we cannot see?”[189]
[182] St. Matthew, x. 34 sq. St. Luke, xii. 51 sqq.
[183] Tertullian, Apologeticus, 3 (Migne, Patrologiæ cursus, i. 280 sq.).
[184] St. Gregory the Great, Homiliæ in Evangelia, xxxvii. 2 (Migne, op. cit. lxxvi. 1275).